[Previous] Tales from the underground economy...

 [Next] Krugman on the Economy...

Some related posts from Technorati and Google.

[Westmont Progress Homepage RSS] Economic rescue plan draws varied reactions from Main Street Westmont: Increased FDIC insurance coverage The most concrete element of the rescue plan bill beefs up FDIC deposit insurance coverage for account holders from $100,000 to $250,000 in the event a bank goes under. It’s supposed to prevent a run on banks.

[Dr. Housing Bubble Blog] Economic Main Street Manifesto: 10 Reasons how this Bailout Fails ...: I mean if Wall Street didn’t have this insatiable appetite, people would never have had the money to inflate the bubble.  Without massive deregulation, the environment would not be in place.  And frankly, speculators and borrowers also share in the responsibility.  But I don’t agree like some blowhard radio personalities that this bubble was caused by poor people in sub-prime loans.  Please.  Yes, let us once again blame the poorest in society for swindling Wall Street out of trillions.  The credit default swap market is somewhere around $50+ trillion.  Currently there are about $500 billion in sub-prime loans out there.  This is beyond that.  This is a massive Ponzi scheme perpetrated by greedy and crony capitalistic on Wall Street and their tools in D.C.  That era is now coming to a spectacular end.

 [Comments for New Republican Party Blog] Comment on McCain Warned; Now The Freddie Mac/Fannie Mae ...: “Between 2004 and 2006, when subprime lending was exploding, Fannie and Freddie went from holding a high of 48 percent of the subprime loans that were sold into the secondary market to holding about 24 percent, according to data from Inside Mortgage Finance, a specialty publication. One reason is that Fannie and Freddie were subject to tougher standards than many of the unregulated players in the private sector who weakened lending standards, most of whom have gone bankrupt or are now in deep trouble.

 [Reason Magazine - All Reason Articles from the Past Year: Page 1] The Roots of the Crisis: The unexpected 228-205 defeat of the housing bailout in Congress Monday threw a curveball across Wall Street. It contributed to a large sell-off on Wall Street, where the bailout had already been "priced"

 [OPERATION ITCH] Financial Meltdown 101: In this way, the SIVs generated money to purchase the mortgage-backed securities from their bank. The SIVs made money by getting high yields from the subprime MBSs they brought, while paying out low yields to the money markets that purchased the commercial paper (profiting from a spread like this is known as arbitrage).

 [HispanicTrending] The economic slowdown and the Hispanic market: The Hispanic ...: There have been a lot of stories pointing to the fact that the Hispanic market has been hit harder than the general market by the sub-prime housing situation, evidenced by the massive foreclosures and strong drop in home values in western states like California and Nevada and the real estate free-fall in South Florida, which all represent significant Hispanic population centers. Add to this trend the fact that a lot of housing-related industries, such as construction, which employ a lot of low-skilled labor, have been particularly hard hit.

[Badger Herald: News] Woes on Wall Street: When the housing bubble burst in mid-2006, many began defaulting on their subprime loans. Because of the decrease in housing prices, the homes facing foreclosure were worth less than when they were purchased.

[800-CEO-READ Excerpts] The New Paradigm for Financial Markets: Credit standards collapsed, and mortgages were made widely available to people with low credit ratings (called subprime mortgages), many of whom were well-to-do. "Alt-A" (or liar loans), with low or no documentation, were common, including, at the extreme, "ninja" loans (no job, no income, no assets), frequently with the active connivance of the mortgage brokers and mortgage lenders.

 [Foreclosure 1 Articles] Anatomy of the Foreclosure Crisis: Inter-banks across the globe have gone into a freeze like situation. Aristocratic USA banks like Bear Stearns and Merrill Lynch have been taken over more in the money banks at ridiculously low bargain.

 [The Congress Blog] The Quadrillion Dollar Powder Keg Waiting To Blow: The subprime and Alt-A mortgage debacles, and the soon to be recognized prime mortgage debacle, are little more than a side show with what will become their one to two trillion in losses which the Phony-Fraudie nationalization and the Paulson Ponzi Plunder Plan are meant to address, albeit futilely. However, the real estate derivative problems created by these debacles have been important catalysts leading to the loss of confidence that is preventing banks from lending to one another, because these problems, like a Zippo lighter on high flame, metaphorically speaking, have lit the fuse leading to the quadrillion dollar powder keg waiting to blow any day now, and Hanky Panky and Helicopter Ben are running around like raving, corporatist, fascist lunatics trying to stomp out the lit fuse before the whole world financial system goes up in a blaze of glory.

 [Furrier.org - Business & Technology Blog] Finanicial Crisis - What Really Happened? The Gov Had To Bail Out AIG: New technology like electronic trading meant that Wall Street’s bread-and-butter business of investment banking and trading stocks stopped making much money years ago. So investment banks took their enormous capital and at first packaged yield-enhanced, subprime mortgage loans into complex derivatives such as collateralized debt obligations (CDOs).

 [The Gavel] Oversight Hearing on Causes and Effects of the Lehman Brothers ...: The $700 billion rescue plan is a life-support measure. It may keep our economy from collapsing, but it won’t make it healthy again.

[Nathan Chitty weblog] Commentary on "Financial Meltdown 101" article: Conclusion from the author: There are many other, better options that were proposed: avoiding the poisonous mortgage-backed securities and buying equity stakes directly in troubled banks, re-regulating the industry, sending in teams of government auditors to decide the real worth of financial companies and which should live and die, creating a Home Owners' Loan Corporation to allow the government to buy troubled mortgages directly, allowing local governments to seize foreclosed homes and turn them into subsidized housing to minimize abandonment (which creates ghost neighborhoods, driving down the price of still-occupied homes), public works program, alternative energy investments, a Green New Deal.

[The Journal Blog] Mourning the debt-based economy: Prior to the House vote that passed the expanded, Senate-approved version of the much-discussed Wall Street bailout bill, Congressman Dennis Kucinich (D-OH), who is much too straightforward to ever win a Presidential election, released a statement with the following brief but interesting point:

Reflected tags on Technorati: Blog, Jarusarun's Favorites, Jarusarun's Favorites, Jarusarun's Favorites, Jarusarun's Favorites, Jarusarun's Favorites, EconWatch.com